Complex products that serve enterprises have a plethora of possible configurations that are set during an installation. For example, an installation of an EMC® VNX® storage system involves setting values of parameters including a cache size, cache page size, and cache watermarks of storage processors, as well as the physical placement of the storage drives and configuration of hot spares. Such an installation may vary according to customer goals in connection with, e.g., performance and power consumption.
Because of the complexity of the installation of such products, there typically exists a best practices procedure for installing a product in order that the product operates according to documented specifications. A conventional best practices procedure involves making a best practices document available to customers for installation. A best practices document is a record of a procedure that has been tested and verified to provide optimal operation of a product. Such a document may be provided with the product or made available on a server over a network. Without such best practices documentation, a customer installation of a product without sufficient expertise may result in suboptimal performance of the product. Using such a best practices document, on the other hand, a customer or vendor representative can tune installation for optimal operation according to performance and/or power consumption goals.
Occasionally, a customer may provide feedback to the vendor regarding an installation. For example, suppose that the customer discovers a flaw in the performance of a product that was not apparent at the time of installation. The customer would then provide feedback on the drop in performance, and the vendor may attempt to adjust the best practices procedure to improve that performance.